The case of Binyam Mohamed: US charges the last Brit in Gitmo

The US have announced they have charged the last British citizen held in Guantánamo Bay. The Pentagon has arraigned Binyam Mohamed, 30, for plotting with al-Qaeda to bomb apartment buildings in the US. His defence lawyers argue that the only evidence for these charges was extorted from him under torture. His lawyers wrote a letter to the Pentagon official overseeing the tribunal system to dismiss the charges stating that all the evidence against him appears to have been "derived from coercive interrogation and torture.” Binyam is the 20th detainee selected to face the military tribunals at Guantánamo, and the fifth in the last week.


Binyam Mohamed al-Habashi, was born in Ethiopia in 1979 and came to the UK with his father in 1995. He worked as a janitor at a mosque in west London. After seven years he applied for political asylum and was allowed to remain while his case was resolved. Binyam travelled to South Asia in 2002 and was arrested in Pakistan on a visa violation. Pakistan, then doing a lucrative trade in extraordinary rendition, turned him over to the US authorities for $5,000. Binyam asked what crime he had committed, and insisted on having a lawyer if he was going to be interrogated. The FBI told him: ‘The rules have changed. You don’t get a lawyer.”

US authorities flew him to Morocco where he underwent 18 months of regular torture including having a scalpel used to make incisions on his chest and penis. He was then transferred to the notorious “Dark Prison” in Kabul, Afghanistan. In operation between 2002 and 2004, it inmates called this top secret facility the “dark prison” or “prison of darkness,” where they were chained to walls, deprived of food and drinking water, and kept in total darkness with loud rap, heavy metal music, or other sounds blared for weeks at a time.

Binyam would later describe his experiences at the Dark Prison to his attorney:
“It was pitch black no lights on in the rooms for most of the time.... They hung me up. I was allowed a few hours of sleep on the second day, then hung up again, this time for two days. My legs had swollen. My wrists and hands had gone numb.... There was loud music, [Eminem’s] “Slim Shady” and Dr. Dre for 20 days.... [Then] they changed the sounds to horrible ghost laughter and Halloween sounds. [At one point, I was] chained to the rails for a fortnight.... The CIA worked on people, including me, day and night.... Plenty lost their minds. I could hear people knocking their heads against the walls and the doors, screaming their heads off.”

Despite being held there for several months Binyam did not lose his sanity. However, his hopes of release were dashed when was sent to Guantánamo Bay in September 2004. Binyam has been there ever since. In November 2005, the Pentagon used the evidence they gained under torture in Morocco to charge him with conspiring to plot attacks against the US. The court papers alleged that he was an accomplice of Jose Padilla in Pakistan where they allegedly proposed a fanciful plan to al Qaeda leaders that they travel to the US to detonate a "uranium-enhanced" explosive device. Although he faced a preliminary hearing, he was never fully tried. Britain sought his release along with another four other British residents in August 2007. While the others were released by Christmas, US refused requests to release Binyam. Last week, he was charged with terrorism-related offences and is due to be brought before a military tribunal at Guantánamo Bay.

In 2003 one of Britain’s top law lords described Gitmo military tribunals as “kangaroo courts”. Lord Steyn, one of the most senior judges in Britain's highest court, said the term implied "a pre-ordained arbitrary rush to judgement by an irregular tribunal, which makes a mockery of justice". Yet mockery or no, Binyam now faces the very real prospect of the death penalty. Binyam is being represented by human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith and his Reprieve team who specialise in representing “prisoners facing execution at the hands of the state in the conventional criminal justice system, or those subject to imprisonment outside the reach of the law in the ‘war on terror.’”

Smith says Binyam is in a very fragile mental and emotional state. Binyam is suffering from depression and has taken to smearing the walls of his cell with his own faeces. On Friday 30 May, Reprieve delivered a letter to Prime Minister Gordon Brown from Binyam that castigated British intelligence services for supplying evidence to his Moroccan torturers. The letter gave a graphic account of the pain inflicted including the cuts to his penis. "I felt like I was being stung by a million bees at once,” he wrote. “The floor was full of blood.” Binyam also spoke of a desire to commit suicide as “that would be one way to end, it I suppose”. A saner way to end it would be for the US to end this obscene charade and release Binyam from baseless and immoral charges.

Human rights groups condemn Australia's refugee swap with the US

American based Human Rights Watch (HRW) has condemned the deal between the US and Australia to trade refugees housed at Guantanamo for those held in Nauru. HRW said the deal upends international refugee standards. “Refugees are human beings, not products that countries can broker and trade,” said Bill Frelick, HRW Refugee Policy director, “[it is] a deal that bargains with lives and flouts international law.”

The two countries announced the deal last week in Washington. Under its conditions, Australia will initially transfer 83 Sri Lankan and eight Burmese refugees from Nauru to the US with a view to sending up to 200 a year. In return Australia will take 200 Cuban and Haitian refugees now being held at the US Navy base (not the prison) at Guantanamo Bay. The deal is designed to frustrate refugees from joining family and community members in a nearby country. Both the US and Australia are detaining refugees offshore to avoid their legal obligations under the 1951 Refugee Convention. Of particular interest here is Article 32: expulsion which says nations “shall not expel a refugee lawfully in their territory save on grounds of national security or public order” and even then only after a “reached in accordance with due process of law”.

Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews said Australia would only accept refugees from the US for resettlement if their claims had been found to be genuine. Prime Minister John Howard has also defended the swap saying it will act as a deterrent to people smuggling. "People who want to come to Australia will be deterred by anything that sends a message that getting to the Australian mainland illegally is not going to happen,” he said.

But the Labor Party thinks that the move will send exactly the opposite message. Opposition leader Kevin Rudd says the deal will make Australia a “halfway house” to the US. "It strikes me as passing strange that we now will be playing swapsies," he said. "I am struggling with where all that goes in terms of the logic."

Meanwhile the US was also pouring cold water over the deal’s significance. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack called the deal an "informal agreement" that "does not create legal obligations." "The arrangement does not call for an exchange or a swap of individuals," he said. "And no person ... who is referred would be forced to accept resettlement." He also said no referrals have yet been made for the program.

Refugee groups also see the move as political expediency, yet another example of using asylum seekers as a scapegoat in an election year. But the quick-fix will do nothing to help overcome the world-wide flood of refugees. The move does not address the underlying reasons why people become refugees in the first place: either through war, or through the economic reasons of poverty, lack of health care, jobs, housing and water shortage.

The Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, one of Australia's leading asylum seeker aid, health and advocacy organisations also expressed their outrage over the proposal. They say it is cruel to resettle asylum seekers in countries where they had no cultural connections. Their spokeswoman Pamela Curr said "the refugees were Australia’s our responsibility and the new policy was “shredding” the UN refugee convention. “This is not a container load of washing machines that we've decided to reject,” she said “These are human beings”.

Jed Bartlet gunning for Guantanamo

Actor Martin Sheen has lent his support for Guantanamo detainee Adel Hamad by appearing in a four minute Youtube video on his behalf. The video entitled "Guantanamo: Waiting for Justice" was produced by the court-appointed attorneys of the Oregon Federal Public Defender's Office as they pursue unlawful detention lawsuits in the federal court on behalf of Hamad and other suspected terrorists held at the Cuban detention centre.

In the video Martin Sheen said Americans must not allow fear to overcome their faith in “the laws and values that have made this country great”. Sheen, who played fictional President Bartlet in TV’s The West Wing, made a discreet reference to his own career when he also said "No one should be detained without a court hearing just on the word of a president. Any president." Also in the video is a letter to President Bush from Hamad's wife, Lana, asking him to reunite her husband with their four children.

Sudanese born Hamad, 48 was handed over to US troops after his arrest in Peshawar, Pakistan, where he says he was working as a hospital administrator. The Pentagon says he is an unlawful "enemy combatant" working with Al Qaeda, although Defence Department officials told his attorneys that he could be sent home once US officials negotiate an agreement with counterparts in Sudan. The deal would see the release of Hamad without the US reversing their decision that he is an enemy combatant and that he could potentially pose a threat to the US and its allies.

Adel Hassan Hamad grew up in a small village in Sudan. He took jobs as a schoolteacher and hospital assistant before emigrating to Afghanistan where he worked at a community hospital. His job involved buying food for the hospital and writing vouchers. He also went to Pakistan where he was responsible for getting relief supplies (food, clothing, blankets) for the Afghan refugees coming across the border. Then late one night he was torn from his bed by Pakistan police. He was handed over the Americans across the border in Afghanistan and would soon become Guantanamo Bay Detainee #940.

The US made three allegations against Hamad. Firstly it claimed the hospital he worked in was run by a charity (World Assembly of Muslim Youth or WAMY) that may support "terrorist ideals". Hamad’s lawyers are asking if this is the case why the US is not targeting WAMY rather than a minor employee. Secondly they claim he may have come into contact with Al-Qaeda or Taliban members during his line of work. His defence have stated this link to be tenuous at best and potentially makes criminals of anyone who may come in contact of terrorists.

Thirdly and most importantly the US claims Hamad is an enemy combatant. However he was not captured on a battlefield, he had a valid passport and work visa and Pakistani intelligence found nothing incriminating at his home. Witnesses who knew him (employer, brother-in-law, colleagues and landlord) all describe Hamad as a moderate family man who was completely apolitical. Pentagon policy prevents the military from discussing the cases of specific detainees.

The pressure is growing to release Hamad and others after David Hicks pleaded guilty last week to material support of terrorism at the first American war-crimes tribunal since World War II. Earlier this week the parents of so-called “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh called on President Bush to commute their son’s 20 year sentence as “a question of proportionality…[and] a question of fairness”.

That fairness remains conspicuously absent on Guantanamo. The Military Commissions Act of 2006 denies basic habeas corpus rights to detainees. The Bush Administration opposes detainee rights partially on the grounds that they are terrorists who deserve no better. They also refuse to face the very real possibility that innocent people have been caught up in the system. However, the military have admitted this possibility. In 2005 Brigadier General Jay Hood, the top American officer in Guantanamo, told the Wall Street Journal in 2005 that the military acknowledged that many prisoners shouldn't have been locked up there in the first place because they weren't dangerous and didn't know anything of value. He concluded “Sometimes, we just didn’t get the right folks.”

Cuba Libre

Tipton is a small town in the Black Country. It was once part of Staffordshire but was swallowed up in the conurbation of the West Midlands and is now part of the metropolitan borough of Sandwell. Tipton was a mining town, top heavy with the industrialisation of the 19th century. The coal and iron that fuelled that economy are gone, and the factories have closed. It is now one of the poorest boroughs in England. Sandwell is a British National Party stronghold and the far-right group hold three local council seats. Racism is simmering against Tipton's large mostly-Asian migrant community. Shafiq Rasul, Ruhal Ahmed and Asif Iqbal were from this community. They were boyhood friends who were to become known as the “Tipton Three.” The three men spent two years in US custody in Guantanamo Bay. Filmmaker Michael Winterbottom has now told the astonishing story of the three men in a new film called “The Road to Guantanamo”. The film was released in Australian cinemas on 17 November.

The trio were ordinary young men of no political affiliations. They played for a Sunday league football team in Tipton. They were Muslims but not fundamentalist. But they were no angels either. Iqbal and Ahmed had criminal convictions for a gang assault on a 16-year-old. In September 2001 the trio men travelled to Pakistan. Iqbal travelled there because his parents had arranged for him to marry a woman from Faisalabad. Ahmed was to be best man; Rasul hoped to do a computer course after the wedding. When they got to Pakistan, the country was in an uproar of support for Bin Laden. The US had commenced its attack on Taliban Afghanistan. In a mosque in Karachi the men heard an imam saying they should help the Afghan people in whatever way they could. With time on their hands before the wedding, they hopped on a bus and headed for the border.

When they got to Afghanistan they travelled first to Kandahar and then onto Kabul. As the US bombing got closer, the boys made the decision to go back to Pakistan. They tried to escape in a taxi which merely took them further in to the danger zone. They made it to the Northern Afghan town of Kunduz, when they were stopped and arrested by General Dostum’s Northern Alliance forces on the outskirts of the city. They were among 35,000 prisoners taken to Sheberghan Prison, near Mazar-i-Sharif. But before going into prisoner, they were first crammed into suffocating containers for two days. Soldiers shot bullet holes into the containers which gave them air but also killed many of the victims inside.

On release from the container, they entered the prison itself. They were crammed into cells where they took 4-hour shifts to lie down and sleep. They were held there for a month in nauseating conditions. Only 4,000 of the original 35,000 were still alive. Then they were transferred to US Special Forces at their airbase in Kandahar. The Red Cross saw the men and promised to contact the British Embassy in Pakistan. But two days later they were handed over to the Americans. They were beaten, trussed and loaded on a plane which flew them to the US detention centre at Kandahar. The interrogations started. They were questioned on their knees, in chains, always at gunpoint. Often they were kicked or beaten.

In January 2002, the three men were sent to Guantanamo. The events of 9/11 allowed the Bush administration make a broad-scale attack on the Geneva conventions. The Cuban base was to be the gulag where they could interrogate the “unlawful combatants” beyond the glare of international law. The flight from Afghanistan took 22 hours. Prisoners were dressed in earmuffs, goggles and surgical masks. They were chained to the floor with no backrests and had to urinate and defecate where they stood.

They were sent to the new Camp X-Ray. Most of the men had no idea where they were. Rasul told the Guardian “All I knew was that I was somewhere with intense heat. An American voice shouted: "I am Sergeant so-and-so, US Marine Corps, you are arriving at your final destination.’" In the early days, the detention conditions were extreme. Detainees were forbidden to talk and fed tiny portions of food which they had to eat in ten minutes. Brutality was commonplace. The list of rules was long and difficult to follow. Infractions were punished by Guantanamo's riot squad, the Extreme Reaction Force. A soldier with a riot shield would slam the prisoner to the floor and pin him down while others beat him.

After a few weeks, things began to improve. Inmates got a copy of the Koran, a prayer mat, blankets and towels. Talking was still prohibited. In mid 2002 the prisoners were moved from the open cages at Camp X-ray to the pre-fabricated cellblocks of Camp Delta. The new favoured punishment was solitary confinement. Ahmed was given isolation for writing 'Have a nice day' on a polystyrene cup. The military deemed this 'malicious damage to US government property'. From the beginning of 2003, interviews with MI5, the FBI, the CIA and US military intelligence became increasingly frequent. The methods used were always the same. Prisoners were shown photographs of themselves with al-Qaeda membership forms or be told their passports were found in a raid on an Afghan cave. The Americans claimed they could see the three men in a video of a meeting between Bin Laden and Mohammed Atta.

Rasul said he was initially scared of the interrogations, but changed his mind after a young interrogator asked him: "If I wanted to get hold of surface-to-air missiles in Tipton, where would I go?" "Towards the end the questions just seemed stupid," he said. Meanwhile the trio’s families had engaged lawyers in Britain and America soon after learning of their whereabouts in February 2002. The men had one important alibi. The fact that they were in trouble with the police mean that they could prove they were in England when they were supposed to be at Al Qaeda camps.

Eventually the British government interceded on their behalf. Despite their release, the Foreign Secretary Jack Straw continued to cast doubt on their innocence. He said: "Because... the police and Crown Prosecution Service judged that there is insufficient evidence to mount a prosecution on evidence that is admissible in the British court, it doesn’t follow from there that therefore the original detention was unjustified.” They were released without charge in March 2004 after 25 months in captivity. Immediately prior to their release, the FBI tried to persuade the men to sign a form admitting links with terrorism. None of them did so.

Michael Winterbottom told the Independent why he made the film, “we'd heard about the Tipton Three, so we got in contact with their lawyer, to arrange a meeting. Luckily they were interested in telling us their story. What was fascinating about the way they described the experience was that two of them were teenagers when they left, and one of them was 21, and none of them were particularly religious or political before they left; even when they were talking about it with us, after the event. And when they described it, it was in a matter-of-fact way, like someone telling you about their holiday - the holiday from hell".

All three are now back in England but living in safehouses in the south. Tipton is too dangerous for them to return. Many people there still think they were guilty and racism is rife. Effigies of men in orange jump suits have been strung from lampposts. The pall of suspicion is not just confined to Tipton. Ruhal Ahmed was refused a visa when he tried to visit Australia in October to promote the film. The distributor, Palace Films, was bringing him to Australia for the launch. The Attorney-General, Philip Ruddock, said he was aware the Immigration Department had refused a visa to a British national "following a prejudicial security assessment by ASIO". Ahmed was bemused by the decision. "If I'm not a threat to my own country then I'm definitely not a threat to another country,” he said.

Just another day in Hicksville

U2 started their tour of Australia last night with a call to release David Hicks from Guantanamo. Speaking from the stage in Brisbane, Bono said, "We call for David Hicks to be brought back to Australia”. The South Australian Hicks has been detained for five years at Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba since he was captured with Taliban forces in Afghanistan. He is yet to face trial. Bono’s plea is the latest in a string of high profile calls to end a miscarriage of justice. Even the unsympathetic Australian government now concedes Hicks has been held by the US for too long.

David Hicks was born in Adelaide in 1975. His father Terry Hicks described his son as adventurous. As a young man, David worked on rural properties in the Australian outback, experimented with drugs and fathered two children. In 1999, aged 24, he left his home in Adelaide with a one-way ticket to Pakistan intending to travel the Silk Road. But he changed his plans after a spur of the moment decision. Kosovo was dominating media attention. By the time Hicks got to Albania the war between Serbia and Kosovo's Albanian majority was almost over. He trained for four weeks with the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and signed up with NATO. Then a peace deal meant foreign volunteers were sent home under NATO orders. Hicks came back to Australia where he started to become interested in Islam. He converted and began to learn Arabic. For his next adventure he wanted to travel to Afghanistan. Hicks went back to Pakistan in 2001 where he worked in a madrassa (an Islamic school) and trained with Lashkar-e-Toiba.

He was in still in Pakistan on 11 September 2001. On hearing the news of 9/11, he immediately packed his bag and travelled to the Al Qaeda guesthouse in Kandahar, the Taliban capital of Southern Afghanistan. He crossed the border just before it was closed. After a few weeks, he was threatened with homelessness unless he volunteered to help the Taliban. David telephoned his father from Kandahar to tell him he was going to help the Taliban defend Kabul from the Northern Alliance. When the US air strikes started, he was told to guard a tank. When Afghanistan’s fourth largest city, Mazar-e-Sharif, fell to the Americans, Hicks went to the frontline. Within hours of arriving, the front collapsed. The few hundred foreign fighters fled and were chased by the Northern Alliance. After two weeks in hiding, Hicks was picked up at a taxi station, trying to leave the country. The Northern Alliance sold him to the Americans for $1,000.

In January 2002, the first of the prisoners from Afghanistan were loaded, hooded and shackled, on to a plane for Guantanamo Bay. David Hicks was among them. The Howard government was quick to echo American claims and publicly denounced Hicks as a “dangerous terrorist.” In July 2003, the US announced that Hicks would be among the first six Guantanamo detainees to be tried as terrorists. Immediately they were all put in solitary confinement. They were placed in tiny windowless cages about 2.5m by 1.8m. There was no natural light. They were let out of the cages for 15 minutes each week. In a 2004 affidavit, Hicks said he had been beaten with fists and rifle butts while blindfolded, subjected to extreme cold and strobe lights, and had his head rammed into asphalt on multiple occasions. Since 2002, David’s father Terry Hicks has been on a tireless one-man crusade to achieve justice for his son. The 2004 Curtis Levy film “The President Versus David Hicks” followed Hicks snr in his quest to find out the truth about his son. Terry retraced David’s travels through Pakistan and Afghanistan in an attempt to understand the motivations and the reason for his arrest.

After two-and-a-half years in custody, Hicks was finally charged in 2004. The charges were conspiracy, attempted murder and aiding the enemy. There was no allegation that Hicks killed or specifically harmed anyone. The charges repeated what was known; Hicks trained in Al Qaeda camps, defended a tank near Kandahar and travelled to the frontline with the intention of fighting US-led forces. More puzzling was the claim that Hicks translated al-Qaeda training material into English from Arabic. Hicks’ Arabic remained rudimentary at the time of his arrest.

Hicks and the other Guantanamo detainees remain in legal limbo; unable to invoke the writ of habeas corpus to test the legality of their imprisonment. The US has classified them as ‘enemy combatants’ not prisoners of war and therefore have denied them the protection of the Geneva Convention. Hicks’ military trial was initially set for January 2005. But in November 2004, the US Federal Court ruled that the military commissions were neither competent nor lawful. The Appeals Court overruled this decision in July 2005. But in June this year this US Supreme Court ruled the military tribunals were illegal under US law and the Geneva Conventions. The case against Hicks is now on hold while the US Supreme Court decides whether to hear a further appeal by a Yemeni detainee against the legitimacy of the trial process. An Australian senate hearing in October was told the current charges against Hicks have lapsed and the regulations governing the new military commissions will come into force in January. The long wait for justice continues.

Gulag Gitmo

Guantanamo Bay nestles gracefully on the sun-kissed Caribbean South East coast of Cuba. It is America’s oldest overseas Naval Base and the only one in a country with which the U.S. does not maintain diplomatic relations. Since 2002, it is also the home of the most notorious detention centre in the world.

The Guantanamo Bay detainment camp also known as Camp X-Ray and as Gitmo has been the home to over 600 suspected terrorists, the majority of whom were captured in the Afghanistan invasion post 9/11. As the camp is outside US jurisdiction, the inmates have languished here without trial and without POW status. The US government is now coming under increasing pressure to shut down the secretive camps. The EU has stated this week that “holding suspected terrorists without trial there is a human rights violation”.

The bay has played a prominent role in Cuban history. The land adjacent to both sides of the southern end of Guantanamo Bay was leased indefinitely to the US in 1898. But the Americans were not the first foreign power to land there. Britain and Spain had long contested control of the Caribbean. In 1729 they signed the Treaty of Seville which gave the Spanish the right to search British ships. The treaty gave rise to the delightfully named “War of Jenkins' Ear". When the Spanish searched a Captain Jenkins’ ship, he claimed the Spanish had cut off his ear. He exhibited the severed organ to the House of Commons and the British declared war on Spain. The British invaded Spanish controlled Cuba and landed at a bay that the local Taino Indians called “Guantánamo”. They briefly renamed it Cumberland. But they left a year later and the war ended in the same unsatisfactory state as the ear that gave it its name. Spain continued to rule Cuba until the end of the 19th century. When a US battleship was blown up in Havana harbour in 1898, the US invaded the country and placed Cuba under a 20 year trusteeship. During that war the U.S. fleet needed shelter from the summer hurricane season and Guantanamo Bay was chosen for its excellent harbour.

In 1903 they established a perpetual lease for the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base (shortened as Gitmo). A 1934 treaty reaffirmed the lease and granted Cuba free access through the bay. It also made the lease permanent unless both governments agreed to break it or the U.S. abandoned the base property. Until the Castro revolution, many Cubans worked on the base. The revolution took over five years to oust the Fulgencio Batista regime and it wasn’t until 1958 that tide turned in Castro's favour. That year traffic was halted to the base. The new rulers continued to allow Cubans to work there and cross by bus or on foot. However, they also forbade new recruitment. As of 2006 only two elderly Cubans now make the daily trek. Castro planted a 13 km “cactus curtain” around the base to prevent Cubans seeking refuge on the base. US troops also planted 75,000 landmines in the area, the second largest landmine zone in the world after the Korea border.

The base was used to house Haitian refugees in the 1990s that fled their country after President Aristide was overthrown by the military. They were removed in 1993 after a US court found the camp unconstitutional. The camp was opened again in 2002 after the Afghanistan invasion. A report for Seton Hall Law School based on Defence Department data showed that 86% of the prisoners were handed over by bounty-hunters rather than as the result of any American investigation or intelligence action. The report alleged that because the bounty-hunters were compensated per head, they detained innocent civilians in order to make more money.

There were four camps, Delta, Echo, Iguana and X-Ray. X-Ray was a temporary facility now closed but the name Camp X-Ray still remains as a synonym for the whole facility. Over 600 people have been held there from 35 different countries. One of the inmates is Australian David Hicks. Australia has made no effort to seek his release. In July 2003, Hicks was one of six detainees first determined by President George W. Bush to be eligible for trial by a military court. As of three years later, no trial has commenced. Frustrated by lack of Australian support, Hicks has sought British citizenship through his English mother. Britain has already won the release of all of its citizens and Hicks is hoping for the same outcome. Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer believes that Hicks 'would be dodging justice’ if he succeeds.

Rights are granted to POWs under the Geneva Conventions. These conventions date back to 1859 after Swiss businessman Henri Dunant witnessed one of the bloodiest battles of the nineteenth century at Solferino in Italy. In 1862 his book "Un Souvenir de Solferino" proposed a plan to care for wartime wounded. His proposal was taken up by the Société genevoise d'utilité publique (Geneva Society for Public Welfare) and the first of the Geneva Conventions was born. Dunant went on to found the International Red Cross. The US has ratified all four Geneva conventions however they got round this for Gitmo by classified the detainees as “illegal combatants.”

It means prisoners are held in a legal black hole, most without access to any court, legal counsel or family visits. Many detainees allege they have been subjected to torture or other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. This treatment include sleep deprivation, the use of so-called truth drugs, beatings, locking in confined and cold cells, and being forced to maintain uncomfortable postures. In 2005, Amnesty international called the facility “the Gulag of our times.”

Matters came to a head this week when three detainees committed suicide. The camp commander described the suicides as “an act of asymmetric warfare waged against us". He was echoed by the US deputy assistant secretary for public diplomacy Colleen Graffy who said the suicides were “a good PR move.” Lawyers said the men who hanged themselves had been driven by despair. William Goodman from the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights said they were "heroes for those of us who believe in basic American values of justice, fairness and democracy". The suicides have further heightened the calls to close the facility.

President Bush says he would like to close the camps but was awaiting a Supreme Court ruling on how suspects held there might be tried. The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule by the end of June on whether military tribunals of foreign terrorist suspects can proceed. Meanwhile the pain continues. What British judge Lord Steyn said as early as 2003 hold true just as much today, “As a lawyer brought up to admire the ideals of American democracy and justice, I would have to say that I regard this a monstrous failure of justice.”